PRIVACY -Is Big Brother Coming To Your Wallet?
RFIDs are also being embedded into event tickets, ostensibly to help with crowd management and keep out gate-crashers. Accenture put RFID chips in attendees’ badges at a recent conference and used them to gather data about whether attendees went to different sessions from the ones they signed up for, and to ensure only invited guests were let into certain breakout sessions.
Next year, visitors to the World Cup soccer tournament in Germany will have an RFID chip in their tickets designed to allow gate agents to determine whether a ticket is authentic. German tournament officials insist that the chip will not contain any of the personal data from customers’ ticket application forms. But they’re sufficiently worried about a customer backlash to create a 79-item FAQ about the subject on the World Cup website.
Whenever companies decide to deploy RFIDs containing personal data, CIOs will have to figure out what’s going to be done with the data. "Sure they can keep it," says ABI Research’s Michielsen, "but people are going to want to know what companies are doing with it."
$firstKeyword
Everything BlackBerry with tips, news and reviews from our mobility expert Al Sacco.
